


The Damnable Bell

by disenchanted



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Christian Character, Consent Issues, M/M, Naval Hierarchy, Power Imbalance, Secret Relationship, hot boys cold winter, sexy bible study
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-02
Updated: 2018-12-02
Packaged: 2019-09-05 09:00:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,156
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16807543
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/disenchanted/pseuds/disenchanted
Summary: Gibson repents, Irving sins.





	The Damnable Bell

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Lilliburlero for betaing and for providing detail that I incorporated into Gibson's backstory, which in this fic is entirely unrelated to his historical counterpart.

‘But I say unto you,’ read Gibson hesitantly, ‘love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do— Do good to them that hate you…’ 

They sat together, he and Lieutenant Irving, at an otherwise empty table in the corner of the berth, away from the seamen and petty officers who played cards and the fiddle. They had been doing this for several weeks. Gibson—who up until now had not really been known, had not had a reputation as either affable or irritating—had been accused of being a Holy Boy. He didn’t mind; the row with Hickey had humiliated him so terribly that he felt he was impervious to gossip now. 

There were pleasures of his own in this, too. Irving was hiding it well, better than most normal men, but his prick was of a dimension that, when hard, could not be ignored. It would have been better, thought Gibson, if he were frightened of what Irving would do once he inevitably stopped being cock-drunk, but it had been a long winter without Cornelius’ company. Eating things from tins, seeing no sunlight, pouring sherry for the interminable dinners in the wardroom and having only his grog ration to warm him. Gibson sometimes felt as if he were simply a part of the ship’s architecture, a moving shelf that bore sweet wines and clothes-brushes and puddings back and forth. Something being crushed, surely but imperceptibly, by the ice. So he allowed Irving to look at him and get hard—Irving, from whom he had begged forgiveness for his immorality. 

Arranging his legs so that Irving would not be able to see the swell of his own cock in his slops, Gibson read, ’But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know—what thy right hand doeth…’ He lowered his voice: Irving, on the bench next to him, had to lean in close to hear him. It was all right because the words Gibson was saying were holy. 

‘Go on,’ said Irving. 

‘What does it mean?’ Gibson looked towards Irving for help as if he had not spent every Sunday morning from the time he was in breeches to the time he left for sea in a pew at All Saints Pavement. He had been told by men who had fucked him that his face was sweet and trusting, that he could not hide his feeling. He had been told he looked better with a beard. The men could make a game of it: was the hair around his cock the same colour? There were men on _Terror_ , he knew, who never fucked at sea. Gibson could not imagine the privation. He wanted to be buggered until he forgot about England. 

Irving had said something. Gibson hadn’t listened, though there was nothing in his face that would convey that to Irving. The left and the right hand— Part of the same body? Irving was nodding for him to go on, and Irving’s fingertips with their well-scrubbed nails were resting very lightly on his thigh. There were spots of colour in Irving’s cheeks, beneath his beard, and his light eyes looked dark in the lamp-lit berth. 

‘That thine aims may be in secret—’ muttered Gibson.

He licked his fingertips to turn the page, and Irving’s fingers slipped off his thigh. Slowly Gibson raised his eyes to see that Irving was gripping the edge of the table: his brow was furrowed, he’d a bewildered shine to his eyes. Something about the unsteadiness of his breathing made Gibson remember the sounds Cornelius had been making that day in the hold, when Gibson was sucking his cock and he was perhaps thirty seconds from finishing at the moment Irving’s step sounded on the ladder. Had that been the beginning of all this, or had it begun in England, private in each of them? Then Irving sank back, breathless. Oh god, thought Gibson, he’d made Irving spend. 

‘That thine aims—’ He had said that bit already. Irving was frightened and Gibson found he’d no words to comfort him, least of all words from this book. All he did here was read things aloud, use his mouth to make sounds out of pictures, which he’d been told was a gentlemanly skill. There were no gentlemen here.

* * *

They met in the same damp corner of the hold where Irving had found Gibson and Cornelius. It had been Irving’s suggestion. It was a Sunday; if Sir John had been alive he would have given a divine service. Irving’s hands were shaking, and he tried to disguise it with roughness. He pulled at Gibson’s waistcoat, tore his shirttails out of his slops. A rat’s squeak echoed in the hold and Gibson remembered how Cornelius stood on his toes to bite Gibson’s neck, suck such dark bruises into his skin that he’d had to wear his collar turned up or a kerchief around his neck for a week. It was good that discipline on _Terror_ was lacking. Crozier could stay drunk in his cabin, tended to by Jopson, and Gibson could make Irving repent for what he had done to him. 

‘What do you do?’ asked Irving, in the low, quiet voice he used when clarifying a phrase in the bible. ‘Show me— Show me how to do what Mr Hickey did to you.’

Cornelius had been right: Irving could not even imagine how two men might gratify each other. Probably Irving had imagined until now that pleasure only came when one gave one’s wife a child. But it was good that Irving had not left behind a child. Gibson unfastened Irving’s trousers and cupped his cock, the weight and rigidity of which made him weak in the knees. He was imagining having it in his arse. Irving’s legs were faltering too; he leant forward against Gibson, clutching him to keep steady. 

‘Keep still and I’ll show you one thing,’ murmured Gibson. As he dropped to his knees the fabric of his slops was dampened by a thin layer of bilgewater. 

Gibson thought of the ice outside, smooth and unbreakable, devoid of leads. Under the moon it was a beautiful pure blue, smoother than Gibson’s pale freckled shoulders, which Irving exposed as he pulled the collar of Gibson’s shirt wide. Unsatisfied, Irving’s hands drifted up to Gibson’s hair. Gibson opened his mouth and took the tip of Irving’s cock into it, wetting it with his tongue before he took it further. Beneath the creaking of the ship’s timbers Gibson thought he heard Cornelius saying, ‘What a lovely cocksucker.’ Irving’s prick was much bigger than Cornelius’, thicker and heavier, though Cornelius had been big enough for Gibson already; sucking it was making Gibson’s jaw ache. Whose approval did he want, and whose love, and were these the same? He thought perhaps these were the sorts of questions that only women who would become wives could ask. 

Holy Irving hadn’t the first idea what it was like to suck cock. Gibson could tell by the way he pulled his hair, thrust into his mouth, made his cheek swell with it: like he really was part of the ship, a thing to keep maintained in the hopes that it may yet have its use, and then to use. Irritated, Gibson pulled back. Irving forced his head down again with a palm to the skull. The crown of Irving’s cock drove into his throat, and he gagged but let it through, thinking morosely that Irving had nothing against which to compare this. Cornelius stroked his cheek with the back of his hand and said, ‘Faster, faster— Yes, deeper now,’ or else, if they’d had to be silent, showed him with gentle touches. 

Why always Cornelius? There had been other men for Gibson before him. It was not even the first time he had allowed an interloper to think that he was being pressed. Even then it was all wonderfully new. There was a different taste to each yard he had on his tongue. He had no envy for the officers’ sherry. And Irving was an officer—subordinate, but Gibson was a subordinate officers’ steward. Gibson was still higher on the ladder with Irving’s prick in his mouth than he had been with Cornelius’. His father was a stonemason’s labourer; when he felt compelled to grouse he reminded himself of the house he had grown up in, a kitchen and a parlour and two upstairs rooms around a courtyard with a pump and a washhouse, shared by seven people (five children) and a cat. 

When Irving spent, Gibson held his cock in his throat and swallowed around it, taking the spend without having to suffer the sour taste on his tongue. You are, he thought, what you eat. He went on sucking Irving hard after he had finished, making Irving hurt, though Irving shuddered in silence. 

‘That thine aims may be in secret,’ said Gibson, hoarsely, pulling his shirttail up to wipe the spit off his chin. He rose to his full height and refused to stoop, so that he was an inch or two taller than Irving. ‘I was pious enough once.’ 

‘Are you again?’ asked Irving.

In the minute they had left to them, Gibson took Irving’s hand and brought it to his own prick, showing him by feel how to frig him. Irving put his face in Gibson’s shoulder, biting on the sweat-yellowed fabric of his shirt, and kept it there until Gibson came, his prick jerking in Irving’s grip. Gibson shook without feeling it. He shut his eyes and without satisfaction tried to imagine someone else’s hand on him. He could have been kind, he thought, and let Irving go without spoiling him further.

‘There,’ whispered Gibson. He wiped his and Irving’s hands off with the same spot of shirttail he’d used to wipe his spit. Every man on this ship, and on Erebus too, was soiled with the excesses of the others’ bodies. That was what happened during birth, during death. He kissed Irving to give him his own taste, and kissed sweetly. When Gibson was a ship’s boy, with a bare face and hair even oranger than it was now, men had taught him to kiss this way, feeling that they were in some sense protecting him from the real sort of cruelty that could happen in close quarters on long voyages. It was a joke, of course, but Gibson enjoyed passing on this private joke to Irving, whom he had never seen laugh, and only very rarely smile. 

It was one of the coldest days of the winter. Irving wore a knitted scarf, blue and grey, finely detailed. He rubbed the end of it along his mouth as if he were patting with a napkin after having taken a bite at dinner. Not, Gibson thought, a conscious gesture of distaste. The particular lift of his eyebrow, the hasty glances he ventured into the darkness of the hold, were the unmasterable tells of self-loathing, in which Gibson recognised his own image. Now he saw the left hand, now he saw the right. Above them, footsteps sounded on the deck.

* * *

When the watch changed, Gibson helped Mr Jopson and Mr Genge prepare the wardroom for the officers’ dinner. They lay down blue china plates and carefully-folded napkins, sets of cutlery with ivory handles, crystal glasses and decanters filled with wine too fine to be tasted by anyone but an officer. Slipping down the passageway, wearing the gloves he’d spent a week scrubbing and twisting in heated ice water, Gibson passed Hickey, who was hauling his caulker’s things aft. 

Smiling, Hickey tipped his head and glanced over Gibson’s shoulder into the wardroom, where Lieutenant Irving was talking to Lieutenant Hodgson just quietly enough that Gibson couldn’t catch what they were saying over the noise of the men. It was as if they thought the stewards were listening, as if they bloody gave a damn. 

‘Mr Gibson,’ said Hickey. 

‘Cornelius,’ said Gibson. 

‘Cold night?’ 

‘Cold as ever.’ Barren, beautiful, that circling black horizon he would not be allowed to go above and see. It didn’t matter, he saw nothing in it, that was not why he was here in this outer darkness. 

Clearing the table after the officers’ second-to-last course, Gibson took one of the table knives and speared a piece of meat—beef, he thought? in some kind of sauce—that Crozier had left on his plate, having no appetite for anything but drink. He waited until he was in the passageway to do it, but he thought, having swallowed and licked his lips, that he needn’t have bothered: no one was looking at him. 

After the officers had had their coffee they dispersed, pleased to be released from the stifling wardroom and their slurring captain. Irving edged past Gibson, brushing Gibson’s chest with his shoulder, Gibson’s waistcoat with his greatcoat. As Irving disappeared into the dim berth his gilt buttons glittered in the lamplight.

* * *


End file.
